The first time I met Annemari in person, I was 18 and she was 16 (a moment of ‘holy crap,’ please). I was spending three weeks in Oxford, and took a coach to London for the day to meet up with her. We found each other at the entrance to Kensington Gardens, and wandered down to Cromwell Road to visit the Natural History Museum.

By the time Annemari and I got to the Natural History Museum the Monday during our September trip, I was tired and wearing nine plasters on each foot, and I went off to sit on a bench after dramatically croaking, “Go on without me.”

(Okay, I did not say that, but I probably said something equally pathetic. Allow me the poetic license.)

I mention my pitiful state for two reasons: a) when Annemari and I first met, I still felt super awkward and tried to like, not be a disaster; not anymore; and b) this post is brief, a collection of photos I took as I trailed after Annemari throughout the dinosaur display and the mammal and reptile rooms. The mammals had considerably better lighting, though, so if you want snakes, you’re better off checking out my zoo post.

We walked to Brasserie Gustave from our hotel in Earl’s Court — it was about twenty minutes away, like most places in Knightsbridge, and we wanted to see more of our area.

The restaurant is located on a side street off Fulham Road, and it’s easy to have to look twice before realizing the beautiful house you’re looking at is in fact a little French restaurant. It tells you what to expect, right away: a cozy home-like feeling, warm and intimate.

Here’s a post I’ve been talking about for a little while. It’s a little visual peek into the local town fair that’s on every summer between August 15 and August 22. Many places in Spain have fairs around this time, because August 15 is a common holiday in the country (and other countries!) as the day of the Assumption of Mary. Many patron saints of towns are a Virgin Mary of some sort or another; ours is del Prado, which is my mom’s name.

On August 15, they take the sculpture down from where it stands in the cathedral, and it stays down for people to pay their respects until August 22. There are parades each day, and fireworks at the end of them; and then fireworks at midnight at the fair location.

It’s not particularly exciting, honestly, but a lot of it reminds me of my childhood. I used to love going on rides up until I was 11 or 12; I’m not sure what happened, but I’ve always still loved the fireworks. I remember families gathering at the bars, and I’m told there was a time when I was a little girl that my family went after the Witch Train ride when it set up around the province so I could ride it. I remember my grandfather spoiling me rotten and how they gave us free tickets at so many of the rides because he bought me so many.

I remember the swan stand because I was obsessed with it, though I can’t recall if I ever won anything! I didn’t do the fishing most of the time, anyway. There are a lot of target stands of various sorts, and a bingo tombola, and a bunch of other tombolas, and bars and — those are not really the things I remember fondly. For me, it was always the rides and the ice cream and the fireworks and the cotton candy. And the churros my grandfather or my parents bought.

My favorite ride as a kid was the baby Ferris wheel, and the Dragon, which I was too small for so my father usually rode with me.

I didn’t go to the fair for a few years when I was a teenager; I didn’t love going out with friends at night, and I relished the time alone when my parents and my sister went. Only for the past couple of years I’ve dragged my mom out to see the fireworks. It’s crowded, and I don’t really like rides anymore, and I’m painfully aware of how incredibly racist the mechanic bull rides are, and I wish I could deface them with graffiti, a desire I can honestly say had never crossed my mind before.

But still, there are fragments that stick. We look for them later and find them.“Tears of things”: now that I’ve shed them, the line that most comes to me lately—memory speaking in dactyls.

I’m going to tell you a little story about my sense of direction. I hope my sense of direction forgives me for it.

In April of 2014, I made the very scary, very terrifying decision to move to London on my own. Surprising everyone but especially me, I lasted a year before I moved back home. (It was a very good decision. That was a stressful year, financially.) In that time, I admittedly did not get out of Belsize Park much, and at least I eventually learned which way Swiss Cottage lay from the intersection of England’s Lane, Primrose Hill Road and Eton Avenue. Considering that’s precisely where my regular Starbucks was, it took four walks too many.

But anyway.

I went back in early September to retrieve the luggage I left behind with a friend. I wrote down directions, and ran out of battery on my phone on the Stansted Express, which, as it turns out, has plugs in it. I only noticed this two minutes before reaching Liverpool Street Station.

The google maps directions for buses were weird, and I walked out of the tube station and went down the street, then west on the street, then thought, “The fuck is going on? I don’t recognize anything. Is that way the way I went when I had that modeling gig at a studio on Fleet Street? No. Blackfriars? A bridge? St Paul’s? Y’all, I’m so confused.”

I had some battery left on my phone, which was very dark, so I checked again under the inning of an Itsu.

This was not the way to the bus stop.

I walked back to the station, and up the street beside it. There were letter signs on the station doors to that side, but what could they possibly be? People were waiting outside them, but there were no poles with bus signs on them, and it dead ended. But there were buses at the end of it, and — could one possibly be the number I was looking for? Where would it stop to pick up people?

Then I looked to the side and realized the letter signs on the station doors were bus stops.

Um, duh.

I made it to my next bus stop and saw Canada House. Unlike Liverpool Street Station, I’ve been to Trafalgar Square a few times. I know the area between it and Charing Cross Road well enough to not have to pull out a map while dragging other people places with me. This meant absolutely nothing to me this time, when I had to ask tourists with a map if Orange Street was on it (it wasn’t), and then found a Caffè Nero — my phone was completely dead by now — to pull out my laptop and check google maps on that.

Guess what? If you see the National Gallery, which you cannot miss, and walk to the left side of it until you hit a street, that is Whitcomb Street, which goes up to Orange Street. You can see the Thistle sign even if you’re nearsighted and wearing a t-shirt in 10-degree weather because you’re coming from Spain and you couldn’t be bothered to carry a hoodie somewhere outside your suitcase. The Canadian embassy with all its maple leaf flags is right in front. You can’t miss it.

If you’ve been around for any of my moves on Twitter, you’ll know every time I complained about packing up until the fifth or last pack, at which point I finally thought to lay everything out on a bed and go SCIENCE.

I mean, it’s not science. Probably. But by the time you’re thinking about weight distribution, standing over your laid-out clothes and saying, loudly, “Step back! I’m going to try SCIENCE!” feels like the only way to hold on to your sanity for long enough to get you on your way.

Today, I’m sharing some tips on packing light for your summer holidays, and a few of my travel essentials! Just a heads up that by summer holidays I mean “holidaying somewhere it’s summer, and relatively warm,” so if you’re heading to Antarctica, even if it’s July, this may not help as much.

I’m nowhere near as lazy about walking when I can do it with my camera, slowly, especially with a friend. So the first week I spent in London last year involved some long-ass walks. I’m not sure which was the longest; our first day there, Annemari and I took a while to find — after, let’s be real, probably getting lost — the building Ashley was living in at the time, and I basically got a full view of Marylebone right there… and a fair share of Fitzrovia. The last Sunday, we covered a ridiculous amount of ground, between Regent’s Park and Baker Street and the one successful flat viewing of the week (it was Benji and Mindy and the chihuahua, wasn’t it?).

Today, I’m showing you what I wore on Wednesday — yes, this is April 30, 2014, but let’s be real, I still wear this shit on a regular basis. (Except the jeans, which I only wear if I’m going to be photographed. They’re too thin. Too much like leggings.)

Essentially, I am stalling while I figure out what each main point of our walk was, because quite frankly I’m fuzzy on the details of the whole first bit. Let me just…

Holy god. That was a long-ass walk. I didn’t realize St Paul’s Cathedral was that far out there! Well, we were there to meet Ash, but we missed her, and so I decided I wanted to see the Tate Britain. It’s a thing. I planned my first trip to London — in 2007 — around a Millais exhibition. I’m a walking cliché, but that’s my favorite museum in London, in terms of the art inside. (Favorite building is the Royal Academy; I couldn’t tell you why.)

So I stopped at a Waterstones to use their WiFi on my tablet — I didn’t have a phone plan back then — and figure out how to get there. Or rather, how to get to the river. From there I was pretty confident of my ability to keep walking until I saw Vauxhall Bridge.

And then we walked. For EVER.

It was brilliant, and this is an outfit post and therefore just a taste of the truly outrageous amount of photos I took that day.

The night before I flew to Spain in April, I had the chance to stay at the Travelodge opposite Euston station in central London. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect — I’ve seen a lot of Travelodge reviews over the months, and they tend to be rather mixed. They’re often worse for the more modestly located ones, but still I was hoping it would be like the pictures: no-fuss, clean rooms designed for comfort, the kind of solid decor I wish all studio flats had.

And reader, it was.

The Travelodge chain is budget hotels, and they are everywhere. There was in fact a Travelodge closer to the hostel where I’d stayed the night before — in Marylebone. But I got the Euston one, and I was very, very pleased. I was most pleased when I got a call and it took me ten minutes door to door to get from my room to an office on Oxford Street. That was such an eye-opener, and here I thought I had it good (I did) living in Belsize Park, twenty or thirty minutes from the city center by tube.

Add Euston to my list of pipe dream places to live, somewhere between Belgravia and Marylebone.

A while back — a really long while back, for full accuracy, though not as long a while back as another outfit I’ve got scheduled — I met up for coffee with Laila from Tape Parade and Belphoebe from Rags of Love. I suggested slash pressured them to meet in Camden because I could walk there and I’d never really got a good look at it: I’d just seen the main road and was convinced people were making up the charm.

The walk was not quite as pleasant as I’d hoped for, as there was this misting rain coming down, it was quite drearily gray, and I was running late, so I wasn’t exactly stepping around leisurely with my camera as befits a pleasant walk. Also, I got lost. I’d checked the map multiple times beforehand, and walking straight down from Haverstock Hill seemed super boring, so I wanted to postpone the turn onto that road as long as possible, and so headed down Belsize Park Gardens towards “south.” I forgot “south” was Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, not Camden, and so, when I got to King Henry’s Road, I had to turn back and figure out where I was on an offline phone map, and how to go east and actually reach the right road.